Monday, June 30, 2014

In a well-documented article for the New York Times Kevin Carey explains that Americans lag the world in education. Receiving a degree is
not the same thing as receiving an education.

Carey evaluates the evidence fairly, but this requires him to
lead us through a series of studies, tests and evaluations.

It is true, he explains, that America has some of the
greatest institutions of higher learning. But, that is for the 1%. When you
look at the rest of the educational system, and especially how well educated
Americans are, the results are far less sanguine.

It’s fine, Carey says, to rate universities by the number of
Nobel laureates on their faculties, but if you test students and graduates
themselves, you discover that they cannot compete with their peers around the
world.

He writes:

The
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example,
periodically administers an exam called PISA to 15-year-olds in 69 countries.
While results vary somewhat depending on the subject and grade level, America
never looks very good. The same is true of other international tests. In PISA’s
math test, the United States battles it out for last place among developed
countries, along with Hungary and Lithuania.

America’s
perceived international dominance of higher education, by contrast, rests
largely on global rankings of top universities. According to a recent ranking by
the London-based Times Higher Education, 18 of the world’s top 25 universities
are American. Similarly, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually
by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gives us 19 of 25.

The Organization for Economic and Commercial development has
tested adults around the world. The results, for America, are not encouraging.

Carey reports:

The
project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult
Competencies (known as Piaac, sometimes called “pee-ack”). In 2011 and
2012, 166,000 adults ages 16 to 65 were tested in the O.E.C.D. countries (most
of Europe along with the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and South
Korea) and Cyprus and Russia.

Like
PISA, Piaac tests people’s literacy and math skills. Because the test takers
were adults, they were asked to use those skills in real-world contexts. They
might, for example, be asked to read a news article and an email, each
describing a different innovative method of improving drinking water quality in
Africa, and identify the sentence in each document that describes a criticism
common to both inventions. The test also included a measure of “problem-solving
in technology-rich environments,” reflecting the nature of modern work.

When the test was limited to college graduates, America did
not fare very much better:

Only 18
percent of American adults with bachelor’s degrees score at the top two levels
of numeracy, compared with the international average of 24 percent. Over
one-third of American bachelor’s degree holders failed to reach Level 3 on the
five-level Piaac scale, which means that they cannot perform math-related tasks
that “require several steps and may involve the choice of problem-solving
strategies.” Americans with associate’s and graduate degrees also lag behind
their international peers.

American
results on the literacy and technology tests were somewhat better, in the sense
that they were only mediocre. American adults were eighth from the bottom in
literacy, for instance. And recent college graduates look no better than older
ones. Among people ages 16 to 29 with a bachelor’s degree or better, America
ranks 16th out of 24 in numeracy. There is no reason to believe that American
colleges are, on average, the best in the world.

Why does it matter? Because of what it portends for the
international labor market.

We should worry less about government-mandated minimum wage
levels and ask ourselves how much value an American worker can add to an
enterprise. If, as Carey suggests, an undereducated American worker will add
less value than a foreign worker, corporations will have an incentive to move
jobs overseas. Why pay higher wages to workers who cannot make a concomitant contribution to their companies?

He concludes:

This
reality should worry anyone who believes — as many economists do — that
America’s long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human
capital. The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as
more jobs are exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be
increasingly dangerous to believe that only our K-12 schools have serious
problems.

We don’t burn the great books anymore. We don’t have to. No
one reads them anyway.

The Nazis burned books. Maoists forbade everyone to read
anything but the thoughts of Chairman Mao. We have done them one better: we
make the great books available but tell people not to read them. So much for the free exchange of ideas.

It’s a totalitarian mindset, bent on the suppression of
serious thinking.

Robert Maynard Hutchins was prescient when he wrote, more
than six decades ago:

To put
an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not
necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a
few generations.

Hutchins wrote these words in his introduction to a
fifty-four volume set of books called: Great
Books of the Western World. It was published by the Encyclopedia
Brittannica and sold door-to-door. With a starting price of $298—sixty years
ago—it sold more than a million sets.

Writing in The
American SpectatorDaniel Flynn bemoans the fact that people no longer
read. Surely, they no longer read the great books. In many cases they no longer
read books at all.

Flynn explains:

According
the Bureau of Labor, Americans spend about fifteen minutes a day reading. They
spend about two-and-a-half hours a weekday watching television and nearly an
hour playing games or messing about on the computer. The feds haven’t yet
created a separate category for taking selfies or obtaining new tattoos, but
anecdotal evidence suggests that their popularity exceeds reading, too.

At the least, we need to question this. How much of the time
spent messing around on a computer involves reading newspapers, blogs and
Facebook posts. It’s not all videogames.

True enough, Flynn notes, libraries give books away for
free. Then again, so does Amazon. Most of works that were included in the Great
Books are available for free on Amazon. If not on Amazon, through easily
accessible pdf versions.

So, it does not feel quite right to blame the decline of
reading, such as it might be, on gadgets. Nor does it feel quite right to slide
effortlessly, as Flynn does, from the Great Books to Rob Sheffield’s Talking to Girls about Duran Duran.

Flynn would have a better argument if he noted that most
people used to read and study the great books in high school and college. One
does not, in normal circumstances, sit down willingly to peruse a volume of Leibniz.
One has to be taught how to read such books.

No one is going to learn how to read Confucius on his own. Guided
by a capable teacher, we are able to discover what the greatest minds of our
civilization are trying to tell us.

Agree or disagree, you will improve your ability to think if
you study the way the greatest thinkers went about the task.

Nietzsche once said that we learn more from the errors of
great minds than we do from the truths of lesser minds. If he were alive today
he would have had to modify his adage: we learn more from the errors of great
minds than we do from the errors of self-important mediocrities.

It is not the fault of the gadgets. Let’s blame it on an
educational establishment that no longer believes in the Great Books. Let’s
blame it on teachers who would not know how to teach many of these books
anyway.

Too often today, when educators bring the great books to the
attention of students they want to show how they have promoted the hegemony of
white males.

At best, today’s academics show students how to deconstruct
the texts, find out signs of patriarchal attitudes and dismiss the enterprise
as part of the vast conspiracy called Western Civilization.

Many years ago, when deconstruction was first gaining a
foothold in the American academy, a professor
friend explained to me that he did not have to read Plato’s works anymore
because Derrida had deconstructed them.

People did not stop reading the Great Books because of
Amazon. They did not stop reading philosophy because of Facebook. They stopped
because their teachers taught them that they did not need to read such things. They
stopped because their teachers taught them that the Great Books were part of a
vast conspiracy to pollute their minds with logocentric, phallocentric,
patriarchal, capitalistic, imperialist, colonialist thought.

It’s not the same as book burning, but, in the end it’s a
more effective way to kill free inquiry and intellectual achievement.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

To me and many others meditation seems like a perfectly fine
and beneficial practice. I do not meditate myself but I know people who have
benefited from it.

After all, there are no chemicals involved. What could be
wrong with a little self-exploration, or better, with a little added
mindfulness?

Today, mindfulness meditation is one of the latest forms of
psychotherapy. It tells you to slow down and smell the petunias, to focus on
what you are doing, to live in the present and to relax.

What could be wrong with that?

Of course, there are many kinds of meditation.

Traditional psychoanalysis has always involved meditation.
It does not include Buddhist chants but it encourages an introspective journey
into your mind. (I discussed the point in The Last Psychoanalyst.) Psychoanalysis has never been a conversation between
patient and analyst.

Now that psychoanalysis has faded from the scene, a more
Eastern form of meditation has become more popular. And apparently more
effective.

Yet, when something seems too good to be true, when it seems
to provide an utterly risk-free path to enlightenment and mental health, we
should ask questions.

Until I read Tomas Rocha’s Atlantic article, I had hesitated
to ask such questions. I still do not know enough to do more than speculate,
but the research performed by Brown University physician Willoughby Britton is
certainly worth considering.

Rocha raises some important questions:

We have
a lot of positive data [on meditation]," she[Britton] says, "but no
one has been asking if there are any potential difficulties or adverse effects,
and whether there are some practices that may be better or worse-suited [for]
some people over others. Ironically," Britton adds, "the main
delivery system for Buddhist meditation in America is actually medicine and
science, not Buddhism."

As a
result, many people think of meditation only from the perspective of reducing
stress and enhancing executive skills such as emotion regulation, attention,
and so on.

For
Britton, this widespread assumption—that meditation exists only for stress
reduction and labor productivity, "because that's what Americans
value"—narrows the scope of the scientific lens. When the time comes to
develop hypotheses around the effects of meditation, the only acceptable—and
fundable—research questions are the ones that promise to deliver the answers we
want to hear.

"Does
it promote good relationships? Does it reduce cortisol? Does it help me work
harder?" asks Britton, referencing these more lucrative questions. Because
studies have shown that meditation does satisfy such interests, the results,
she says, are vigorously reported to the public. "But," she cautions,
"what about when meditation plays a role in creating an experience that
then leads to a breakup, a psychotic break, or an inability to focus at
work?"

Let us be mindful and slow down. Britton makes excellent points.

The first and most obvious is that mindfulness meditation
should be led by a Buddhist monk. In today’s America it is often led by a
physician. One imagines that this helps patients get their sessions reimbursed.

If you are practicing meditation with a Buddhist monk you
will be aiming at something more than enlightenment. You will end up belonging to a new
community.

If you are learning meditation from a physician, you would not
have such a goal in mind.

One should consider the psychosocial difficulties that arise
when your meditation cuts you off from your world and does not provide you with
a new community.

Obviously, some people are so well grounded in their community--even their company-- that meditation might help them to function better within it. but, anyone who
is detached and lost, who suffers from anomie, might be ill served by a
meditation practice that detaches him further, that sends him into psychosocial exile.

Then again, even Buddhist meditation includes experiences
that correspond to what St. John of the Cross called the “dark night of the
soul.”

I would hypothesize that this occurs when someone who is transitioning
out of his old community has not yet arrived at his new community.

Rocha offers this version, from a Buddhist meditation
teacher:

Shinzen
Young, a Buddhist meditation teacher popular with young scientists, has summarized
his familiarity with dark night experiences. In a 2011 email exchange between
himself and a student, which he then posted on his
blog, Young presents an explanation of what he means by a "dark
night" within the context of Buddhist experience:

Almost everyone who gets anywhere with
meditation will pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, [and]
disorientation. …The same can happen in psychotherapy and other growth modalities.
I would not refer to these types of experiences as 'dark night.' I would
reserve the term for a somewhat rarer phenomenon. Within the Buddhist
tradition, [this] is sometimes referred to as 'falling into the Pit of the
Void.' It entails an authentic and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No
Self. Instead of being empowering and fulfilling … it turns into the
opposite. In a sense, it's Enlightenment's Evil Twin. This is serious but still
manageable through intensive … guidance under a competent teacher. In
some cases, it takes months or even years to fully metabolize, but in my
experience the results are almost always highly positive.

Of course, you might not want an
insight into emptiness and the void. It is not too encouraging to think that it
might take years to “metabolize” the breakdown you experience when you get so
completely into your mind that you are completely lost to other people.

For my part, I suspect that an
individual who throws off his old community will lose his sense of identity. He
will no longer know who he is or even if he is.

Philosophers and psychologists assume
that your identity is a state of consciousness that tells you that you are who
you are.

And yet, I suspect, again as I
argued in The Last Psychoanalyst, that identity depends far more on how
we look to others. If one day you wake up and go about your daily routines, but
no one you know recognizes you, you will start wondering who you are. If people
are all calling you by a name that is not yours, you will start feeling that
you do not know who you are and that you do not exist as the person you were.

It is not an accident that some
people, when they join holy orders change their names.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

America is having something of a libertarian moment. At a
time when we are being governed by a statist administration that takes its own
word for law, young Americans are finding their way to the libertarian cause.

In one sense, this is a great thing. Someone needs to defend
free markets, free expression, free enterprise and even free will. If young
people do not do so they will suffer the consequences.

In another sense, they risk, as I wrote in my book, The Last Psychoanalyst, confusing
freedom for responsibility with freedom from responsibility. After all, if you
want to see what freedom from responsibility looks like you need only look to
the White House.

In the proper circumstances, free will, which has lately
been under attack by behavioral economists does not lead to a free-for-all.

One understands that young people are flocking to
libertarianism because they like the Republican Party but do not like social
conservatism. They consider it intrusive and inhibiting.

And yet, true freedom does not lie in the other extreme.
True freedom is not a synonym for debauchery.

Riding the wave of libertarianism is the movement to
legalize marijuana possession. Without taking sides on the issue, it is worth
examining Catherine Saint Louis’s excellent New
York Times report about the campaign to legalize week. In it, she explains
that those who are arguing that marijuana has distinct medical benefits are, as
the saying goes, blowing smoke.

If marijuana contributes to debauchery and if young people
want to debauch themselves without fear of punishment, they might say so. To
pretend that marijuana should be legalized because it is a medicinal agent
appears to be largely a ruse.

Saint Louis explains this well:

New
York moved last week to join 22 states in legalizing medical marijuana for
patients with a diverse array of debilitating ailments, encompassing epilepsy
and cancer, Crohn’s disease and Parkinson’s. Yet there is no rigorous
scientific evidence that marijuana effectively treats the symptoms of many of the
illnesses for which states have authorized its use.

Instead,
experts say, lawmakers and the authors of public referendums have acted largely
on the basis of animal studies and heart-wrenching anecdotes. The results have
sometimes confounded doctors and researchers.

The
lists of conditions qualifying patients for marijuana treatment vary
considerably from state to state. Like most others, New York’s includes cancer,
H.I.V./AIDS and multiple sclerosis. Studies have shown that marijuana can
relieve nausea, improve appetite and ease painful spasms in those patients.

She is not saying that marijuana is never helpful for any
patient at any time. She is saying that we need to rely more on science and
less on PR:

Patients
with rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, qualify for marijuana treatment in at
least three states.

Yet
there are no published trials of smoked marijuana in rheumatoid arthritis
patients, said Dr. Mary-Ann Fitzcharles, a rheumatologist at McGill University
who reviewed
the evidence of the drug’s efficacy in treating rheumatic diseases. “When
we look at herbal cannabis, we have zero evidence for efficacy,” she said.
“Unfortunately this is being driven by regulatory authorities, not by sound
clinical judgment.”

New York
considered including the chronic inflammatory disease on its list, a
development that astonished Dr. Mary K. Crow, an arthritis expert at the
Hospital for Special Surgery, in Manhattan. People with rheumatoid arthritis
have higher rates of certain respiratory problems, she noted.

That’s right. Our solons want to make it possible for
patients with rheumatoid arthritis to smoke weed… even though they notably have
respiratory problems.

It does happen, Saint Louis explains, that marijuana
sometimes helps:

Amanda
Hoffman, 35, an information technology specialist in Basking Ridge, N.J.,
struggles with ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease. She has tried
steroids and Remicade, an intravenous infusion, but no drug has given her as
much relief from frequent daily diarrhea and abdominal pain as her homemade
cannabis caramels.

And then there is glaucoma. One often hears that marijuana
is a good treatment for that condition.

Saint Louis puts the argument in proper scientific context:

Since
at least 2009, for instance, the American
Glaucoma Society has said publicly that marijuana is an impractical
way to treat glaucoma. While it does lower intraocular eye pressure, it works
only for up to four hours, so patients would need to take it even in the middle
of the night to achieve consistent reductions in pressure. Once-a-day eye drops
work more predictably.

Yet
glaucoma qualifies for treatment with medical marijuana in more than a dozen
states, and is included in pending legislation in Ohio and
Pennsylvania. At one point, it appeared in New York’s legislation, too.

The moral of the story is that the public debate about
marijuana legalization is filled with false scientific claims. In many ways it
would be better if we were debating whether or not we want to legalize a party
drug.

But then we would have to address the real question: how
much harm does it do to growing and developing brains? If a fourteen-year-old
does not care about whether he is damaging his brain by smoking weed, ought he
to have the freedom to do so?

I’m with Robert Sapolsky. I may not be as high-minded as he
is, but I too cannot resist “a feeling of malicious, chortling pleasure” when I
see someone or something with “a reputation for saintly purity tarnished by
warts and blemishes.”

Oxytocin is a human binding hormone. When women climax they
produce extra oxytocin. The result: they feel closer to their lovers. When
women give birth their bodies produce oxytocin—presumably, the hormone
facilitates childbirth. (The world itself comes from Greek words that mean:
swift birth.) Oxytocin also promotes
lactation and maternal instincts.

Sapolsky does not mention that the hormone is associated
with women. The male body also produces it, but oxytocin seems to be
responsible for the fact that women are, supposedly, more cooperative, more caring,
more loving and less competitive than men.

When certain people say that if women ruled the world there
would be peace everywhere they are, in part, basing their conclusions on the
power of oxytocin.

Further research has outlined some of oxytocin’s other
benefits.

Sapolsky summarizes them:

Oxytocin
facilitates the formation of mother/infant bonds and of male/female pair bonds.
Among humans, couples who are administered oxytocin (versus a placebo) have
fewer intense fights, and the men rate their partners as more attractive and
spend less time looking at other women.

The
hormone's reputation got even better. Studies found that oxytocin lessens
stress and anxiety; fosters trust, cooperation, forgiveness and generosity; and
makes people more attuned to others' emotions. True believers in oxytocin
proclaimed it the "love hormone" in some scientific journals. It seemed
that if oxytocin were dumped in the water supply, everyone would lie down
between lions and lambs.

Think of it: science has discovered a love hormone, an
empathy hormone… drop it in the water supply and the Age of Aquarius will dawn
on the earth.

It won't be very long before an enterprising behavioral economist decides that we must all be forced to drink up a certain amount on a daily
basis.

But there are problems. Enough to make Sapolsky chortle.

Oxytocin makes you feel all warm and fuzzy toward members of
your own group, but it increases your hostility toward those who belong to
other groups. It produces xenophobia.

Uh oh!

Sapolsky is too kind to put it in these terms, but oxytocin
seems to make people more racist.

When test subjects in Holland were asked whether they would
push someone under a trolley to save five other people—a standard psycho text—those
who were juiced on oxytocin were more likely to sacrifice someone with a foreign
name.

They were happy to throw Helmut or Abdul under the trolley
but would have saved Luuk or Maarten.

Uh oh!

So much for peace on earth. So much for solving all the
world’s problems with biochemistry.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Another test revealed that
oxytocin is more likely to make you lie and cheat… especially when it benefits
your team.

Sapolsky describes it:

Subjects
were told that they were part of a team of three volunteers (with no further
information about teammates). Then each person played a virtual coin-toss game,
with winnings to be divided among the three. The game was a great chance to
lie: Players only had to report whether they had correctly guessed outcomes
beforehand. Of course, guessing yields a 50% success rate, so the higher
someone scored above 50%, the more likely it was that they were cheating.

Control
subjects cheated plenty, claiming an average success rate of 66%. With
oxytocin, cheating rose to 79%. Moreover, oxytocin dramatically increased the
number of outrageous liars. Among control subjects, 23% reported an outcome
with only a one-in-a hundred chance of occurring—a success rate of more than
90%. And subjects on oxytocin? The majority made
this absurd claim.

So, oxytocin makes you more loving, more caring, more peaceful
and more empathetic. But it only makes you feel close to those are belong to
your own social group. It makes you feel more than willing to sacrifice
outsiders in favor of those who are your own, but it also makes you more likely
to cheat to help your team win.

While
pet therapy has long been common in nursing homes and hospitals, gifting
college students with puppy time is “a fairly new concept, but one that has
been well received,” wrote two University of Connecticut staff members in the
research journal College & Undergraduate Libraries.

“College
students face many of the same issues as the elderly, such as living away from
home, often leaving pets behind and adjusting to an impersonal institution,”
they wrote. “Studies have shown that interacting with an unknown dog reduced
blood pressure, lowered anxiety, and reduced self-reported depression among
college students.”

If it works for students in Harvard Medical School, it might
even work for you:

Harvard
Medical School’s library has a Shih
Tzu named Cooper, available for playtime with students two days a week.
Cooper has his own reservation
page on Harvard Library’s website. “He enjoys fetching his squeaky
toys and stuffed animals, as well as a good game of tug. Should you have a good
cry or even feign a whimper near Coop, you are guaranteed to get lots of
kisses,” according to his owner’s description.

A recent study, reported by Jesse Singal in New York Magazine,
does not really discuss therapeutic tactics, though both of these approaches
come to us from one or another kind of therapy.

When you engage in positive framing you are putting a
failure in a different, more positive context. Basically you are saying: Suck
it up and move on.

Jesse Singal describes positive reframing:

There's
a deep well of encouraging phrases most people turn to when trying to cheer up
a friend or loved one: "You'll do better next time." Or "It's
not really that bad, is it?" Or the relatively straightforward "Come
on — cheer up!"

The study shows, reasonably, that sometimes this works and
sometimes it does not. It depends on the person you are addressing.

When you use positive reframing with someone who has what
the researchers call high self-esteem, your words will make failure appear to be a one-off event, something uncharacteristic.

Which is the way someone who is confident sees failure.

He will weigh his failure against his past successes and will be
receptive to someone who rejects the notion that he is defined by a single
failure.

But, the research shows, positive reframing does not work
when people are generally depressed, or, as the researchers say, suffering from
low self-esteem.

Singal summarizes positive reframing in relation to both
negative events, like failures, and anxiety:

They
found that so-called "positive reframing," which, as the name
suggests, is an attempt to put negative events in their "proper"
perspective, not only doesn't resonate with people with low self-esteem, but
can actually fully backfire and make the comforter feel worse about themselves because their
comforting is not working, potentially damaging their relationship with the
person they're trying to comfort.

And then:

Taking the
example of someone positively reframing their partner's anxiety about a job
interview, the researchers write that positive reframing "may suggest to
some ... that their anxiety about the upcoming event is unfounded and that
their relationship partner does not truly understand or accept their
feelings." The comforter may then react negatively to the comfortee's lack
of responsiveness, leading to a negative cycle.

Let’s be clear. Comforting someone who has flunked calculus
is not the same as talking with someone who feel anxious about an impending
performance. The first is a failure; the second is an anticipation of a possible
failure.

Someone who has less confidence will see his failure as part
of a pattern. He will not see himself as someone who has failed, but as someone
who is a failure. Thus, a friend who tries to cheer him up will not be
connecting because he will not be recognizing the way he sees himself.

Yet, even if positive reframing does not work well with
people who see themselves as failures, a good therapist will usually try not to
underwrite the person’s sense that he is a failure. He will try to help the
person to amass evidence that tends to contradict the sense of being a failure.

When it comes to performance anxiety, things are different.
It is not very helpful to tell someone who is anxious about a performance that
he has no reason to be anxious. A more helpful response, Singal suggests, is to
recognize that the emotion might well be suited to the situation. One finds it hard to imagine, however, that anyone, faced with a friend who is anxious about performing in an important game will say that the performer has no reason to feel anxious.

In a different context, when a friend is grieving the loss
of someone near and dear, you acknowledge the appropriateness of the emotion.
If the person tells you that he or she is anxious about the future, you will
readily agree that the emotion is appropriate.

For the record, negative validation is not really negative.
It affirms that an anxious or depressed friend has reason to feel the way he
feels. Thus, that his emotions are reflecting something about his situation or
circumstances.

In cases where people are anguished and do not know why they
are feeling what they are feeling, one should always assume that the emotion
suits their real life circumstances. Perhaps your suffering friend does not
know why he is feeling what he is feeling, but still, you must assume that
he is anxious about something, not nothing.

Singal explains why negative validation works with some
people but not with others:

"Negative
validation" — that is, "support behaviors that communicate that
the feelings, actions, or responses of the recipient are normal and appropriate
to the situation" — did resonate with people with low self-esteem, on the
other hand. (People with high self-esteem tended to respond well to either
positive reframing or negative validation.)

It is important to underscore, as Singal does, that people
who have high self-confidence can respond well to either positive reframing or
negative validation.

(Perhaps I am being persnickety, but if you tell someone
that his emotions are appropriate to his circumstances, you are offering what I
would call an affirmative validation.)

Finally, if you try positive reframing with someone who has
low self-confidence, you are not, the researchers say, suffering from a lack of
empathy.

People with high self-esteem tend to assume that others also
have high self-esteem. Thus, they assume that if positive reframing works with
them it will work with others. You might say that they are failing to recognize
the low self-esteem in their friends or you might say that they are giving their friends the benefit of the doubt.

It seems also to be true that people with high
self-confidence gravitate to those who also have high self-confidence. They
choose to associate with others who see life in more optimistic terms and avoid
those who do otherwise. Typically, they avoid people who bring them down. That
is one way to maintain high self-esteem.

Singal summarizes:

None of
this is to say the cheer-uppers are bad friends or partners, or that they lack
empathy. The authors point out that it's simply hard for people who have high self-esteem to slip into a
properly empathetic mode when dealing with people who lack it — they even
cite research showing that people who know when to steer clear of positive
reframing have a tendency to slip into it nonetheless. It can be exhausting
dealing with someone who appears to simply refuse to feel better. Even if
you're well-versed on mental-health issues and know this not a helpful
response, at a certain point it's extremely tempting to say, "Get over it!
The sun will rise tomorrow. Let's go get a beer."

The example becomes less interesting when Singal offers an
example of what you should say to someone with low self-esteem:

So, to
take a practical example: If you're trying to console someone with low
self-esteem who is convinced a bad grade on a grad-school paper is a disaster
that highlights how lazy and stupid they are, you'll likely be a lot more
successful with a line like "That must really suck to feel so down about
your grade," as opposed to reassuring them they'll do better next time.

At the least, this example is strange. It is not negative
validation. It is not even validation. It does not tell the person that his emotions are normal, given the
circumstances.

And, there’s nothing empathetic about it either. The speaker is saying that he does not feel
the way his friend does and has no idea what that feeling is. In fact, the
sentence says something like, It must suck to be you, and thank God, I am not
you.

This is not only off-putting… it disrespects and disconnects.

Some people will fail to show empathy by treating you as though you are more self-confident that you are. Others will fail to show empathy by refusing
to connect with you.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

According to a Harvard University study most parents want
their children to be high-achievers and to gain happiness through achievement. Of course, the researchers find this to be bad news.

It seems that parents pay lip service to empathy—the pseudo-value that most educators want
children to acquire—but they are really more like Tiger Moms.

Of course, if this were as true as the study suggests it is,
the nation would have risen up with one voice to praise the Tiger Mom.

It didn’t, so we take all of this discussion skeptically.

It might be that parents value student achievement, but perhaps
they do not value it enough. Or perhaps their feelings do not translate into
the kind of parenting that will produce the desired results.

Of course, parents are only one side of the equation. The study also suggests that schoolteachers also value achievement over
empathy, but what are they teaching these children?

Are they teaching the value of achievement? Are they helping
children to hone their skills to compete with children in the rest of the
nation and the world? Or are they paying lip service to achievement while teaching
self-esteem and empathy?

As it happens, the Harvard study tells us that empathy is
not being ignored. It is simply being put in second place. For all I know,
children would be happier if empathy were put in fourth place.

If
there is any good news to be found in this report, it is that while we may
value other things above empathy, we still care about it, and want our children
to value it. While only 22 percent of the students surveyed ranked caring first
on their list of priorities, almost half of them students ranked caring second,
and 45 percent thought their parents would rank caring second as well.

But, this is not necessarily good news. Perhaps it explains
why American schoolchildren, on the whole do poorly on international tests of
math and language.

Lahey explains:

While
96 percent of parents say they want to raise ethical, caring children, and cite
the development of moral character as “very important, if not essential,” 80
percent of the youths surveyed reported that their parents “are more concerned
about achievement or happiness than caring for others.” Approximately the same
percentage reported that their teachers prioritize student achievement over
caring. Surveyed students were three times as likely to agree as disagree with
the statement “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my class than if
I’m a caring community member in class and school.”

Note well that the educators identify moral character with
empathy. It’s a sleight-of-hand. They are so viscerally opposed to competition
and achievement that they do not understand that sports, for example, builds
character by teaching children to play the game by the rules and to show good
sportsmanship.

They also fail to see that, for someone who is competing in
the arena or the marketplace or the battlefield, empathy is counterproductive.
If you feel for your opponent and feel badly for him when he loses you will
become a weak competitor.

The educators at Harvard are distressed that their efforts
to indoctrinate parents have not been more successful, but perhaps it’s a good
thing that parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children’s success in favor
of being caring and compassionate.

According to Lahey, Harvard educators want:

As the
report shows, simply talking about compassion is not enough. Children are
perceptive creatures, fully capable of discerning the true meanings in the
blank spaces between well-intentioned words. If parents really want to let
their kids know that they value caring and empathy, the authors suggest, they
must make a real effort to help their children learn to care about other
people—even when it’s hard, even when it does not make them happy, and yes,
even when it is at odds with their personal success.

The educators are willing to sacrifice success in favor of
doing charity work, giving to the neediest. They want to live in a nation of social workers, not a nation of entrepreneurs. They are not teaching empathy as
much as they are teaching guilt. What they call empathy seems to be a way to
assuage guilt for being a capitalist oppressor.

Of course, it is not self-evident that the less fortunate
will profit from more compassion and caring. Perhaps they would do better to
learn how to gain happiness through achievement and success.

The educators and psychologists are purveying empathy. They
see it as the supreme moral value and believe that it solves all problems and
produces happy well-adjusted children. We note, yet again, that empathy is not
a moral value at all and that it is so poorly defined that it could mean just
about anything, from feeling someone’s pain to getting along with others.

Psychologist Michele Borda argued for empathy:

Studies show that kids’ ability to feel for
others affects their health,wealth and authentic happiness as well as their
emotional, social, cognitive development and performance. Empathy activates
conscience and moral reasoning, improves happiness, curbs bullying and
aggression, enhances kindness and peer inclusiveness, reduces prejudice and
racism, promotes heroism and moral courage and boosts relationship satisfaction.
Empathy is a key ingredient of resilience, the foundation to trust, the
benchmark of humanity, and core to everything that makes a society civilized.

Of course, these values are anything
but neutral. They are intrinsic to liberal and progressive politics. Whatever
else you think of Borda, she is trying to enlist parents and teachers
in the daunting task of brainwashing children to make them more like her, to
affirm her values.

Unfortunately, this hodge podge
is anything but true. Being civilized means following rules, communicating
clearly, showing respect for others and competing fairly in the arena. The nation's great master of empathy, Bill Clinton was happy to feel everyone's pain, but that did not prevent him from inflicting some on hapless young women.

We are currently living through a
period in our history where we have an empathetic government. We have a
government that cares for people, but we also have a government that prefers to
keep people in a position where they need to be cared for.

Obviously, it depends on what you
call caring. A government that really cared about people would make it easier to create jobs. A government that really cared would be more interested in job creation than in handouts.

What would we do without the Daily Mail? Yesterday, that
wondrous publication reported the latest findings on casual sex. That is, on
casual sex on college campuses. The conclusions: for certain students, it can enhance self-esteem; for others, not so much.

As you might have guessed, those who are most likely to get
a self-esteem boost from casual sex are males. Not just any males, but among
college age students: self-involved, narcissistic, athletic males. It also
helps to be politically liberal.

Obviously, these are also the males who are most likely to
have access to casual sex. After all, politically liberal men are more likely
to spend time with politically liberal women and this latter group—sex-positive
feminists-- might, for all we know, be most susceptible to casual sex, that is,
they might be the least likely to respect themselves.

Meantime, the Daily Mail reports:

Dr
Vrangalova, a professor of psychology at New York University, also defined key
character traits of people who constantly want casual sex.

'They
are generally extroverted, sensation-seeking, impulsive. avoidantly attached'
males, who also invest less in romantic relationships and are more likely to
have cheated on a romantic partner,' she told journalist Ryan Jacobs.

'Among
men, they are also more likely to be physically strong, and especially among
college men, also more sexist, manipulative, coercive and narcissistic. They
also tend to be “unconventional, attractive, [and] politically liberal.'

As it happens, people who are drunk when they have casual
sex are more likely to regret it. Who knew? Obviously, the report is not about just any people. It should be common knowledge by
now that women who indulge this habit are more likely to need to get drunk to
participate.

They are not, dare I say, exercising their freedom.

Things being as they are, we needed a serious research
study, from Emory University, to learn that men are more likely to enjoy casual
sex than are women and that women are more likely to orgasm when their sexual
activities exist within the context of a relationship.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

It’s really all about the shampoo. Specifically, it’s about
Pantene shampoo. Its latest ad promises women that if they stop saying that
they are sorry they will have shinier hair… or something. Apparently, Pantene wants women to associate shiny hair with strength.

Of course!

In fact, the ad is exploiting the feminist effort to teach
women to be more like men, to lean in and to act as though they are strong.
Because, you know, the more you say you are strong the stronger you become.

For a woman, of course, hair matters. It matters enormously.
The reason is simple: something like 70% of a woman’s pheromones—her sexual
attraction hormones—are in her hair. That is why some women let their hair grow
out.

It appears that the folks who conjured up the Pantene ad are
trying to exploit women’s willingness to follow the lead of the Pied Pipers of
feminism. If women really want to be more like men—and less attractive to men--
they should wear their hair short, very short. But, in that case they will be
using less shampoo.

For my part, perhaps because I was well brought up, I do not believe that women are especially prone to pathological behaviors. I do not see them as mindless tools of the patriarchy. I do
not tell women how to dress, for example, and do not believe that the fashion
and cosmetics industries are patriarchal conspiracies designed to prevent women
from fulfilling themselves as assembly line workers.

If women choose freely to wear cosmetics or fashionable, who
am I to denounce them? Why would I lay a
guilt trip on them?

And why does anyone imagine that a woman will gain more
confidence if she is constantly being criticized by other women for acting like a woman?

If your reasoning is based on the specious notion that men
and women are really the same, you will constantly be deriding women for not
acting more like men. And you will be setting them up for failure: a woman who
acts more like a man will be pretending to be something she is not.

Take the current cacophony about how many times women use
the word “sorry.” Clearly, feminists take this behavior as an offense against
their efforts to brainwash the world into thinking that women are just as
strong as men. Feminists believe that if you keep saying that women are
stronger women will become stronger.

Obviously, feminists are missing a few little grey cells.

Now, imagine that women are physically weaker than men. If so, they are more vulnerable to aggression and less capable of defending
themselves. If that is true, a woman’s being more conciliatory would count as
adaptive behavior.

If a woman is induced by her feminist mistresses to stop saying "sorry" and "excuse me" she risks becoming more confrontational. Then she will be exposing herself to more danger.

Then, these women who have followed feminist advice will find themselves in
more dangerous and abusive situations. Naturally, they will blame the patriarchy.

Of course.

In the midst of the usual cacophony about how many times
women say “sorry” Megan Garber of The Atlantic offered an exceptionally
clear-headed analysis of the problem.

She alone, to my knowledge, emphasized the difference
between the everyday use of the term “sorry” and a formal apology.

Garber explains:

Anyway, "sorry"
is … semantically supple. It can be
meaningful, but only in a particular context. It can indicate, depending on the
circumstances in which it's deployed, deep regret—I'm sorry I lied, I'm
sorry I cheated, I'm sorry I ate your plums—but it could also indicate
contrition of a much more casual variety. I'm sorry I bumped into you. I'm sorry I yelled at you, but the skinny latte I ordered had obviously
been made with whole milk.

As Garber suggests, it is wrong to believe that every time a
woman uses the word “sorry” she is a sorry excuse for a feminist.

Here, the question is degree, not kind. Some apologies are
seriously meaningful expressions. Others are casual attempts to promote social harmony.

In some cases an apology represents an admission of failure.
But that is only true in specific ritualized contexts. A CEO who presents himself to the public to
express his deep shame for having failed at his job is not doing the same thing
as you are doing when you jostle someone on the street and say that you are
sorry.

When a CEO apologizes he is saying that he deserves to be
sanctioned for his behavior. He should, in the best cases, resign his position
and retire from public life for a time.

When someone apologizes in the strong sense he is publicly
admitting to having failed a significant duty. He is saying that he will never
do it again, and that he does not deserve to be treated as a respectable
citizen. He will accompany his apology by a resignation and by a temporary
withdrawal from public life.

When you jostle someone on the street or interrupt a meeting
by opening the door at an inopportune moment, you are saying that you made a
mistake and that the mistake was unintentional. You are not saying that you are
unfit for human intercourse or that you will retire from public life for a
time.

Garber distinguishes casual from severe apologies. We can
also call them weak and strong apologies:

They
assume that when I apologize for my clumsiness or my lateness or my plum-eating
(they were delicious,
by the way), I am tacitly admitting to some kind of profound character flaw….

My
casual apology—I'll just speak for myself here—is not a castigation, of myself
or my self-worth or my gender; it is not necessarily—asa Jezebel article, presuming
to speak for all of us, put it last year—an indication of "our guilt
complexes and inner Pollyannas."

The real question is whether one or another rhetorical
strategy works. And, what works for you might not work for someone else.

Sometimes indirect expressions, expressions laden with
niceness and charm are more effective than sentences that are direct and
straightforward.

Deborah Tannen explained that in Japan a manager might
choose not to be very dominant or aggressive, but might prefer to couch a
request in something that sounds like an apology.

If an indirect expression—I’m sorry to have to ask you
this-- the expression that does not really signify contrition, motivates the
employee, why do something else?

Some women tell us that they have profited from leaning in.
Others have lost out on job or promotional
opportunities for mistaking empty self-assertion with effective communication.

If women feel that “sorry” or “excuse me” are effective
conversational lubricants, they should continue to use them. If they
systematically remove such expressions they might find that their relationships
become more harsh and more disagreeable… at the least.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Tiger Moms do not want their children to be cool. They do
not even want their children to be popular. They want their children to work
hard, to persevere and to build good character. They want their children to
develop the skills that will serve them as adults in the real world.

As you know, many parents reject Tiger Mom parenting. They do
not want their children to be raised according to strict disciplinary
standards. They want their children to be cool, to be hip, to have fun and,
especially, to be popular. They justify it by saying that they want their children
to be free-spirited and creative, not repressed grinds.

Who’s right?

Jan Hoffman reports on recent studies that examine what
happens when children are allowed to grow up too soon. Specifically, the
studies target children who adopt adult behaviors in middle school, at around
age 13.

Strangely, Hoffman makes very little mention of the role
that parents might be playing in these cases. She does not ask about whether
these 13-year-olds receive any parental supervision. Are they just allowed to
run around and party? Or are they encouraged to do so?

Again, where are the parents? Are these children unsupervised?
Are their parents are so anxious that their children be “popular” that they
allow them to pretend to be adults? Wherever did their parents get the idea
that children need to learn how to excel at partying?

Hoffman hints at parental dereliction:

At the
same time, other young teenagers were learning about soldering same-gender
friendships while engaged in drama-free activities like watching a movie at
home together on a Friday night, eating ice cream. Parents should support that
behavior and not fret that their young teenagers aren’t “popular,” he said.

One suspects that parents are playing a more active role in
encouraging this pseudomature behavior.

As for the children, Hoffman describes them well:

At 13,
they were viewed by classmates with envy, admiration and not a little awe. The
girls wore makeup, had boyfriends and went to parties held by older students.
The boys boasted about sneaking beers on a Saturday night and swiping condoms
from the local convenience store.

They
were cool. They were good-looking. They were so not you.

How did they turn out? In most, but not in all cases, not so
well.

Hoffman writes:

“The
fast-track kids didn’t turn out O.K.,” said Joseph
P. Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. He is the
lead author of a new study,
published this month in the journal Child Development,that followed these
risk-taking, socially precocious cool kids for a decade. In high school, their
social status often plummeted, the study showed, and they began struggling in
many ways.

It was
their early rush into what Dr. Allen calls pseudomature behavior that set them
up for trouble. Now in their early 20s, many of them have had difficulties with
intimate relationships, alcohol and marijuana, and even criminal activity.
“They are doing more extreme things to try to act cool, bragging about drinking
three six-packs on a Saturday night, and their peers are thinking, ‘These kids
are not socially competent,’ ” Dr. Allen said. “They’re still living in their
middle-school world.”

The children tended to live lives that best corresponded to
what the media defined as cool. Or better, they lived lives that would
entertain others:

A
constellation of three popularity-seeking behaviors characterized
pseudomaturity, Dr. Allen and his colleagues found. These young teenagers
sought out friends who were physically attractive; their romances were more
numerous, emotionally intense and sexually exploring than those of their peers;
and they dabbled in minor delinquency — skipping school, sneaking into movies,
vandalism.

As they
turned 23, the study found that when compared to their socially slower-moving
middle-school peers, they had a 45 percent greater rate of problems resulting
from alcohol and marijuana use and a 40 percent higher level of actual use of
those substances. They also had a 22 percent greater rate of adult criminal behavior,
from theft to assaults.

The children might have received encouragement, overtly or covertly, by parents who wanted them to grow up faster, be more popular and never be alone.

Strangely, a child who pretends to be an adult cannot be
anything but alone. If a child is acting like a character in a play, he cannot
enjoy the everyday and, as Hoffman mentioned, non-dramatic everyday
socialization.

A pseudomature child will learn how to act out, to play a
role, but will never learn how to function in the world.